Pix Of The Day: Trash Collecting Elephant Day
CREDIT: © Ian Scott-Parker/CAMwrangler.com
WHERE: Hurricane, Utah, USA. WHAT: local excitement of trash collecting day.
MAP: Hurricane, Utah, USA. Thumbnail click pops-up larger image.

We featured a desert sewer cleaning camel earlier this month. One reader wrote in to say how amused she was by the fake excitement of such a humdrum event, used as a literary conceit to entertain our web site visitors. Lady, that was no conceit, that was the most exciting day we had around here in months! Earlier today, as is normally the case on a Thursday morning, the giant trash collecting elephant made its way around our neighborhood.

One mighty sweep of its mechanical trunk to empty the wheelie dumpster, a trumpet blast from the diaphragm of its air brakes, then it roared off to the next stop. As the process was repeated, in the opposite direction up the other side of the street, the reason for the replacement elephant in the last couple of visits could be clearly seen: the front driving side fender had been bashed, and then repaired.

Mildred, it's a jungle out there, I tell you… or a desert, at least.

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Smell Skid-Doo Any Other Way
CREDIT: © Kurt Schwehr/Schwehr.org
WHERE: Devon Island, Canada. WHAT: sewage outfall Ski-Doo warning.
MAP: Devon Island. Thumbnail click pops-up larger image.

Another reader, one alert to every tiny mouse of a mistake it seems, spotted that in yesterday's feature 'Ski-Doo' was misspelled. Ski-Doo is a registered trade name, so it is supposed to have one of those spotty ® symbols to soothe the corporate paranoia about identity theft. We checked the web for the correct spelling, and discovered the Ski-Doo company, founded in Valcourt, Quebec, Canada in 1942 by Joseph-Armand Bombardier (1907-1964) called 'Father of Snowmobiling: the J. Armand Bombardier Museum has more.

During our web search we came across Kurt Schwehr's web site. Kurt, it seems, has done work connected with the 'Mars Rover' project, and in 1998 was in Devon Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada, between Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, for the Terrain Modeling of an Arctic Impact Crater part of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project. Devon Island, presumably not counting visiting researchers, is the largest uninhabited island in the world. We had misspelled 'Ski-Doo' as 'Skid-doo', but looking at that picture in Kurt's gallery, well, we're not so sure that we were too far adrift!

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